Paris est la France, et la France est Paris

If you have lived in France (but not in Paris) at least for a little while, you have certainly learned the hard way that there's no France outside Paris. Or, like the inhabitants of the City of Light prefer to put it, Paris est la France, et la France est Paris.

While there are certainly good reasons to identify the French grandeur with the capital city, there is certainly more in France that just Paris. And I'm not only thinking about the food variety, that we experienced yesterday evening at the conference dinner where the excellent food specialties of five different French regions were served. Actually, that we should have experienced, and that were supposed to be served: in reality the food flow was definitively not enough to satisfy the appetite of the disappointed conference participants. But this is another story.

This valuable variety (of fine food, nice places, and of other excellent things) is rarely recognized by the Paris people - that's a fact - but it is was rather unfortunate to discover that this point of view seems to be shared by the French President himself. As you might have heard, Nicolas Sarkozy attended the ICHEP conference yesterday to give an "opening" talk (well, the conference was opened since four days, but still). Now, I really don't want to indulge in commenting the speech, nor I dare to discuss the subtleties of the French research politics. But I cannot refrain at least to note (at a very superficial level indeed) that both in the announcement of the President participation, and especially in the President speech, the French excellence in high energy physics seemed to be contained in circle of a 30 km radius centered on the Tour Eiffel.

I can tell you, this has definitively not pleased those ATLAS colleagues of mine working for instance in Annecy or Marseille, and I guess the other French physicist working for instance in Grenoble, or Clermont-Ferrand, or Strassbourg must not be that happy too. Oh, yes, the press office of the Elisee has finally changed the initial announcement, a now they are cited along with the other Paris university and research centers as "universités de province", but I'm still not sure they are at ease with the classification. And, despite the last-minute change on the web site, the President speech itself was still confined to the "region parisienne"! Are the Paris people really so distracted? I would tend to doubt it, but again, this would lead me to speculate about the current French research politics, and I'm certainly not qualified for this. Pity, anyway.

Monday, brief summary

Since I was having trouble with the WLAN yesterday, I couldn't blog the first plenary session. My colleagues have already written in more detail about the most interesting results presented, so I'll just give a brief summary of my impressions: The LHC experiments are well on their way towards "rediscovering" the Standard Model (they have the low-mass resonances, the J/ψ, Υ, W and Z, and several top candidate events). Nicolas Sarkozy is a politician; it is of course a great honour to have him officially open the conference (in particular when he calls the participants "the hope of the planet"), but it might be unwise to put too much faith into his words regarding research funding. he Tevatron has excluded the Higgs mass range of 158 to 175 GeV and is beginning to also exclude a low-mass Higgs (although the LEP bounds are still stronger there). The rumour about a possible discovery of the Higgs as the Tevatron was just a rumour, the 2σ fluctuation observed is not significant.

A significant discrepancy between theory and experiment was, however, observed at the banquet: theory predicted a stable circulating beam of physicists scattering elastically off several targets representing the culinary traditions of the different French regions. Experimentally, a lot of pile-up events were observed, leading to early depletion of the targets and a failure to achieve saturation for many participants ... clearly, some more effort needs to go into the modelling of such high-density situations in culinary physics.

Gadgets!

There must be some secret competition among the organizers of different conferences, aiming to to invent the most fancy gadget to offer the participants. While probably the organizers sincerely put some effort in this conference gadget business, reality is that the average participant rarely uses them, and often tosses them to dust in a remote angle once is back from the conference.

For instance: why do we get a backpack of messenger bag with the conference logo at every single conference? I mean, nowadays everyone goes to conference with her laptop bag: why should we be always came back home with two of them? And to be fair, the quality of the conference backpacks usually ranges from horrible to barely acceptable: these bags usually fall apart after a couple of months use. Conference organizers, couldn't you spare us? Please!

For the record, this is the content of my brand new ICHEP backpack I got yesterday:

• The backpack itself! I suspect the average organizer believes that the quality of the conference is directly proportional to the number of pockets the conference bag. The ICHEP backpack has even the never-used-by-anyone cell phone pocket on the backpack strap: if my theory is correct, the conference will be a huge success.
• The conference badge. How many of them do you have at home? Do you keep them or do you trow them away? But beware, the ICHEP one might become very important in the next days (but I cannot yest tell you why)!
  
• The ICHEP fancy gadget: this year we got a pen that is also a laser pointer and a 2 Gb USB drive, with the conference program and booklet already loaded on. This could probably sound great, if only the gadget pen was not so over-sized to be difficult to use as... a pen.
• Paper, paper, paper. Including: the conference program, the list of participants, a issue of the CNRS magazine, a few fliers from the conference sponsors, a map of Paris, a map of the Musee de la Science, the tickets for the various social events, and even a booklet with Summer events in Paris this year.
• A weird mouse-pad (or is it a magnetic badge?) with the periodic table of elements. Who ordered that?
  
• A 10%-discount coupon for the Galerie Lafayette, that - as someone put it yesterday during the coffee break - is possibly the best gadget we got! :-)

Parallel sessions

ICHEP is a huge conference, and with huge I mean there will more than a thousand participants, and a loooot of presentations. The standard way to pack a lot of contributions in a huge conference is to hold parallel sessions: talks belonging to different "tracks" (read: with an affine subject) are grouped together, and get presented in different rooms at the same time. So far, so good: if you are interested in a single track - let's say, in anything related to Heavy ions collisions and soft physics at hadron colliders - life will be rather easy for you. Tomorrow you'll just look for Salle 253, sit there all day, and you'll be done. But one might have more eclectic interests, and this is where things become more complicated.

If there is something I learned the hard way about huge conferences with lots of parallel sessions, is that the speakers are strictly not allowed to speak more that the time they were allocated: the participant-with-eclectic-interests must be able to trust the schedule she has been given at the beginning of the conference, and to jump from one room to another just to hear that single presentation talk in that particular session. Chairpersons at huge conference can be very mean with talkative speakers: I wonder how the ICHEP ones have been instructed...

Anyway, that's my program for tomorrow, first day of the conference. The morning will be rather easy: I'll be traveling from Geneva to Paris and will miss all sessions, so I have no real choice to make :-) . But even if I was there, it would be easy: from 9 to 10:30 I'd go to Salle 252B for The SM and EW Symmetry Breaking session and hear about W and Z boson production at HERA, Tevatron and especially at LHC by ATLAS and CMS, and stay there for the same session after the coffee break, for some top-quark galore.

My plan for Thursday afternoon looks a bit more complicated. For hors d'œuvre I plan to go to the Beyhond Quantum Field Theory Approches session in Salle 252B, where from 14 to 14:42 (sic!) Erik Verlinde will be talking about Gravity as an emergent force. There has been some fuss about his work in the last weeks, so I'm curious to hear about it in person, and especially to see the discussion. I'm definitively not a theorist, so this will be even more fun.

From 14 to 15:45 in Salle Maillot there's the Early experience and results from LHC session: I'll skip the Particle ID at LHCb talk, run back from Salle 252B for the CMS and ATLAS calorimetry talks, and especially for the CMS and ATLAS Electron and Photon performance talks.

After the coffee break I'll jump back again in Salle 252B, where the The SM and EW Symmetry Breaking session will take place, to hear about the SM Higgs boson searches at Tevatron. But not immediately: I would probably skip the first talk (Higgs prduction at the Tevatron: theoretical prediction and uncertainties) to be again in Salle Maillot for the Material Studies with photon conversions and energy flow at the ATLAS experiment talk, again in the second part of the Early experience and results from LHC session. In the same session there will be a couple of interesting jet-related talks, but I cannot really miss the Higgs-at-Tevatron talks (even if the D0-CDF combination will not be presented before next Monday), so Salle 252B will be were I'll end my Thursday.

Now the question is: how far is Salle 252B from Salle Maillot? :-)

Provocative 3-sigmas results theorem

Theorem: any experiment that is scheduled to be turned off will have provocative 3-sigma results.

Lemma: any experiment that has been running a long time and measures many things will have provocative 3-sigma results.

Sean Carroll (via Twitter)

Social programming

Ever attended a physics conference before? Then you should know that the most important moments are neither the plenary nor the parallel sessions, but... coffee breaks! Presentations at plenary sessions are often funny and entertaining; talks at parallel sessions is where one can really learn the details of any remote analysis. But for the gory details, the internal gossips, the questions one does not dare to ask in public, and everything that cannot be said in front of a formal audience but that is important to get to know, coffee-break-chats are what one needs. Alternatively, one can similarly profit of being seated at the right table during the conference dinner, or to participate to the right social events.

Now, this year ICHEP is proposing an impressive social program: apart for the usual welcome reception, we will get a concert in the Salon of the "Hôtel de Ville" of Paris on Friday, we can choose among several different visits of Paris on Sunday, we will be able to visit the Grande Galerie de l'Évolution on Tuesday and have dinner there, not to speak of the Nuit des particules. The conference secretariat just emailed me, asking to choose two of the different visits scheduled on Sunday. I have been in Paris more than once and already visited all the locations the program is proposing, so I guess I should instead choose according to a conference-coffee-break criterion. Where would I be able to come across the most succulent gossips? Where will I most likely learn the most by informally chatting during the visit? What would be the spot to attract the conference VIP's? Tour Eiffel? Opéra de Paris? The Jacquemart-André Museum? The "Cité des Sciences"? The Marais neighborhood? The Panthéon? Where do you plan to go?